TheDaak review

The Adivasi Will Not Dance by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, New Delhi, Speaking Tiger, 2015, 200 pp, ISBN 9789385288937, ₹299

by Alok Ranjan

Indigenous peoples are framed as a cultural other for the non-indigenous to affirm their civilisational status. This framing is useful for naturalising the extractability of their labouring, sexual and political bodies. The developmentalist ideology cites their seclusion from modern political and cultural processes to explain their material plight. It includes both welfare and neoliberal developmentalism that warrant populations to embrace statist and capitalist expansion, respectively, to join the road to human progress. Instead, a decolonial form of writing interrogates the points of contact between the indigenous and non-indigenous lifestyles, the traditional and the modern, self-sufficiency and development. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s  The Adivasi Will Not Dance firmly occupies this strand of writing, wherein the Santhal Adivasis of Jharkhand are displaced from their home, land and dignity. In a searing collection of ten short stories that serve as a powerful reminder of the ordinary vulnerabilities affecting Adivasi communities in India, the book brings into question the locations of hospitals, rented urban homes, railway stations, and an official stage for what they have to offer the people entering the presupposed mainstream. These locations that are usually thought of as representing universal-egalitarian spaces become sites of prejudice and predation. This anthology delves deep into these people’s lives, providing readers with an exploration of the social injustices they endure, both beyond and within their villages.  

Shekhar captures a sensitive and nuanced complexity of Adivasi existence that is one of the most remarkable elements of The Adivasi Will Not Dance. He handles issues of witch-hunting, prostitution, women’s abuse, and human trafficking squarely, rendering it impossible for the reader to gloss over the distress of these communities. In the most disturbing story of the collection, “November is the month of the migrations”, Shekhar narrates the journey of a 20-year-old Talami, symbolising extreme poverty, as she heads to Bardhaman district with her family to work on zamindars’ farms. At a railway platform on her way, she is compelled to engage in a sexual transaction with a policeman for pieces of cold bread pakora and a note of fifty. This story sparked controversy, with accusations of vulgarity and women objectification. The book was banned by the Jharkhand government in 2017, and the author was suspended from his job as a medical officer. However, a bold style allows Shekhar to persuade the reader to get involved in the scene of violence rather than as witnesses conveniently informed of it. 

The opening chapter, “They eat meat!” tells the tale of a Santhali family having to modify their food habits after they migrate from Raurkela to Vadodara, where vegetarianism predominates. The family is asked by the homeowner not to reveal their tribal identity in the neighbourhood. “If they ask you where you’re from, please, will you just tell them that you’re from Jharkhand? Just that much, nothing more.”  It reminds readers of how cities profile populations based on their identities and mandates cultural alikeness to accommodate them.  The story is set in Gujarat in 2002 and ends in a neighbourhood coming together in solidarity to face a rioting mob. Some other stories look closer at disparities and scandals near community life.  “Baso Jhi’’ is a story of a patriarchal superstition- of Basanti’s expulsion from the village by her sons and neighbours after declaring her ‘dahni’ or witch following three consecutive deaths in their village Sarjomdih. Here, the often overlooked questions of gender and age surface in the context of Adivasi sociality. In “Merely a Whore,” we navigate the harrowing landscape of prostitution alongside Sona, who yearns for love and a kiss before being brutally assaulted with verbal abuse by her beloved client. In an elongated tension within a short story space, a double inability of the central characters is manifested. The story narrates a sex worker’s intimate challenge of love to a man frustrated with his incapacity to kiss, expressing masculine domination as the only refuge of romantic incapability in her body. 

From mapping different facets of Santhali living, the author arrives at a definitive stance. In a conscious political move, Shekhar closes the book with a narrative of defiance. The titular story, “Adivasi Will Not Dance,” subverts the cultural appropriation coupled with the political domination of Adivasis in the backdrop of their material exploitation. It portrays a dramatic story of Mangal Murmu, an old dance troupe instructor who has instructed dance groups for many years but declines to perform at an event organised in honour of the President of India, as he is troubled by the consciousness that his relatives are being uprooted because of a power plant. This story is inspired by an actual incident of tribal resistance when President Pranab Mukherjee visited Jharkhand in 2013 to lay the foundation stone of a thermal power plant in Godda. Mangal Murmu’s bold proclamation, “Unless we are given back our homes and land,…We Adivasis will not dance,” symbolises defiance of governmental-developmental regimes that prey upon indigenous culture for diversity exhibitions while endangering the Adivasi way of existence and their supporting landscape. Still, the audience of this proclamation can be meaningfully extended to include the whole culture industry, academic community and representational politics. 

Nonetheless, the book’s title and the preceding discussion should not lead a reader of this review to understand the book as an account of Adivasi’s rebellion against the state. It does not focus predominantly on issues of political power and governance. The affirmative tonality of the final chapter is preceded by a reflexive attitude, centring around conventional predicaments of human relationships and poverty. It helps the author portray Adivasis as inhabiting a common human world of aspirations, disappointments, jealousy and despair. Shekhar imagines Adivasi existence beyond cultural essentialisation. Thus, the book features a mother losing her fever-stricken son to poverty while she is out to work, a village family framing a boy for a rape charge, two boys from rich and poor family backgrounds developing contrasting morality and reputations, and a woman looking to revive a relationship with her earlier partner after marriage. These are stories of conspiracy, distress and desire common to all forms of living, including Adivasi lifeworld. 

The book neutralises the dual gaze of cultural contempt and exoticisation. In brief fictional accounts, it gives Santhals human characteristics non-determined by their expected human nature but indulged in encountering multiple sites and aspects of the arrangement of human livelihood. This is not done, of course, in negligence of the oppressive systemic processes that Adivasis are peculiarly placed under. Against a prejudiced view of Adivasi struggles as composed of intelligible actions, this collection brings to the surface powerful speech declaring that the Adivasi will not dance to a tune that disregards their dignity and rights.

This book should merit readers’ attention as a Santhali author’s engaging catalogue of real-life predicaments of Adivasi livelihood, poverty and migration, moving beyond the stereotyped imageries perpetuated in popular discourse and the patronising gaze of political and academic elites. Simple language gives violence a routine quality, while the directedness of depictions is used to stir the reader’s comfort rather than fantasy. His storytelling style does not telegraph the unfolding events, which can be pretty shocking when they occur. Yet, these episodes of violations are not dramatised or given an event-like character, except in the final titular chapter, thus highlighting the everyday nature of the humiliating experiences endured by Adivasis. It challenges the reader of their intuitive thinking to follow the Santhals in their journey even as one is tempted to predict the directions. They don’t begin from our landmarks, nor do they reach the destinations.